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    The New Champions League Format: What’s That All About?

    Full On Fella Posted on

    New Champions League Format

    Many people will have say down to watch the Champions League draw last night with only a vague sense that it was going to be different to how it’s been in the past.

    Although the programme of events regularly made reference to it being a ‘new era’ of the competition, there will have been plenty of football fans still somewhat flabbergasted about what actually happened.

    UEFA have decided that the tournament needed to be given a rejig for reasons we’ll come on to, but even with an explainer video featuring the likes of Zlatan Ibrahimavic and Gianluigi Buffon, the puzzled faces at home will have persisted long after the draw was made.

    Why Have UEFA Changed It?

    You may remember some time ago how football was briefly rocked because of the launch of the European Super League. Teams such as AC Milan, Barcelona, Liverpool and Paris Saint-Germain were to take part in a so-called ‘European Super League’ that offered no promotion and no relegation.

    The 12 founding members would be part of the competition through its existence. Some opposition fans, either wilfully or through stupidity, misunderstood and thought that the teams in question were going to take part in the ESL instead of the Premier League, kicking up a fuss and demanding that the teams be punished in some way.

    In actuality, the European Super League was designed to replace the Champions League, being something of a shot across the bow for UEFA. The big teams didn’t like that they could miss out on Europe’s premier competition, citing the fact that the ESL would allow big matches on a more regular basis.

    Even so, no one really liked it and even players seemed to rebel against it, taking to social media to say that they were against it and didn’t want to be part of it. No sooner had the world found out about it but the European Super League all but collapsed. UEFA, though, had been given a warning and reacted accordingly.

    Extra Places

    The fact that the European Super League offered no way of teams qualifying for it was a major reason why it failed to get off the ground. It was also something that Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA President, made reference to repeatedly when discussing the new-look Champions League, talking about UEFA’s ‘joint commitment to the principle of open competition and sporting merit across the continent’, whilst also ‘sustaining domestic leagues’.

    Because more teams can take part in the new-look Champions League, there are more places available for teams to take up, which you may remember from last season.

    At times in the previous campaign there were discussions around the ‘fifth Champions League berth’ being a possibility for the Premier League. The four extra spots available thanks to the expansion from 32 teams to 36 were decided according to the association club coefficient ranking.

    In other words, the better more teams from the same country did in European competition, the more likely it was that they would get an extra Champions League qualification position. In the end, the two slots for this season went to Germany and Italy, which is how Borussia Dortmund and Bologna managed to make it into the opening stage.

    How Does the New System Work?

    Referred to by many as the ‘Swiss Model’, the new-look to the Champions League is designed to be an answer to the fears of clubs that attempted to launch the European Super League. The first thing to note is that the number of teams taking part in the competition proper has been increased from 32 to 36.

    The next thing, which is arguably the most important, is that the Group Stage of the old-format Champions League has been replaced by one big League Stage that all participating teams take part in. This new format sees all teams play eight games during the initial stage, instead of the six games that were played previously.

    @time2clips_ NEW CHAMPIONS LEAGUE LAYOUT #football #carabaocup #premierleaguefootball #manchestercity #fyp #foryou #f #foryourpage ♬ original sound – Time2Clips

    Teams were put into seeded pots, with each team drawn to face two opponents from each of the pots, including their own. The only thing that they couldn’t do in the league stage was draw a team from their own country. All teams will play four matches at home and four matches away, but they will only play each team once rather than the Group Stage when they played each other twice.

    The hope is that this will allow for more exciting matches and fewer ‘dead rubber’ games when the outcome is all but irrelevant. The top teams will go head-to-head more often and earlier on in the competition than was previously the case.

    The results of each match will contribute to the league position of all participating teams, with the top eight sides making it through the round of 16 automatically. The teams that finish between ninth and 24th will then take part in a two-legged knockout tie in order to secure a place in the knockout phase of the competition proper.

    Those sides that finish 25th or lower will be knocked out altogether. Once the round of 16 gets underway, the competition will revert to the same format as was previously the case, all the way through to the final, including the notion of the games being played midweek apart from the final itself.

    What the Hell Was the Draw All About?

    If you watched the draw then the explainer above will doubtless have gone some way to explaining what happened, but you might still be a little bit confused. It was not, after all, the sort of straightforward draw that we’ve been used to. In the past, two former footballers would draw balls out of pots in order to decide which teams would be playing in which groups.

    It was reasonably easy to do, even if also quite convoluted at times. Because teams were seeded and country-protection was in place, the former footballers needed to pick balls out of certain pots at certain times in order to put the groups together, but that’s all changed.

    The reality is that the new-look Champions League is significantly more complex than it has ever been. Not only was the country-protection still in place but teams also needed to play two teams from each pot, so they couldn’t just do a random draw with all balls in the same pot in case a team, almost certainly Manchester City, ended up drawing six teams from from the lowest seeds.

    As a result, the only teams that were drawn from pots by former footballers initially were one team from the top-seeds, with a computer algorithm then working out who the sides were that said team could face according to what had already been drawn.

    That was demonstrated by Cristiano Ronaldo, grateful that the draw wasn’t being done in the United States of America, pressing a big button that ‘triggered’ the computer reeling out the names of the sides that the club was facing.

    Those that believe in conspiracy theories such as ‘hot balls’ leading to certain clubs receiving favourable draws in cup competitions will not be happy about a computer algorithm deciding the outcome of the draw behind the scenes, but there is realistically no other way it could’ve been done. It is also how the dates of the games will be decided, which we will find out more about on Saturday.

    What it Means for the Premier League

    The new draw is designed to put the big teams together more often, but is that necessarily a good thing? There is certainly an argument that it’s a bit like when The X-Factor went straight to a live audience: where’s the journey? On the face of it you could say that there are some really thrilling ties early doors, with all of the previous seven Champions League finals taking place during the League Stage apart from Chelsea versus Manchester City.

    Yet is that a good thing? The whole point is that they were finals, the crux of the competition. Those games taking place earlier on runs the risk of meaning that the final will be less exciting.

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    For the Premier League, it might well mean that the division itself doesn’t know what’s hit it as the season wears on. The Champions League ties will be taking place between some big fixtures in the top-flight, whilst even those that aren’t can result in some unexpected results given the energy expended by the teams taking part in Europe’s elite competition.

    Add in the fact that there are eight matches that need to be played instead of six and that none of them are going to be ‘dead rubbers’ and you’ve got a real shakeup to the English game like we haven’t seen for years. We have already witnessed it’s impact on other competitions thanks to the League Cup draw.

    When the draw for the third round of the League Cup was done there were all sorts of complaints from supporters of teams not playing in Europe because of how the draw had to be made. The extra Champions League games mean that teams in the competition, as well as the Europa League, couldn’t be drawn to play one another in the majority of cases.

    Had Manchester City been drawn to play against Manchester United, for example, then there would literally not have been space in the calendar for the match to take place. It is frustrating, but it also just the way that things are going thanks to UEFA’s insistence that more football be played, not less.

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